StarTree usage to show UME details

The first I heard about StarTree was in a recent blog Everybody Loves a StarTree by Catherine Van Zuylen. She is from Business Objects, which SAP acquired recently, and she was showing how a StarTree can be used as a navigation and browsing mechanism.

I am quite interested in interesting ways to look at existing structures, so I thought I’d try to take the UME data from a Java instance, inclusing users, groups and roles, plus their relationships and present this as a StarTree.

At the moment this is purely used for browsing, but I am looking at ways of using the same mechanism to set up new relationships, such as assigning a user to a role.

IN terms of implementation, I started with a portal component that extracts the details into a specially formatted text file that is one of the data sources for StarTree. Then I launch a StarTree applet whcih lets the end user do their navigation.

Here are some screen shots from one of our training systems. When it starts it show a high level of Users, Groups and Roles. Under here are nodes for the different letters of the alphabet and then the object itself.

When I scroll right with my mouse, I see the users starting with N and then my details (nicholls). I can also see the groups and roles assigned to me.

Here I go to the groups information to see which roles are assigned to which groups..